Some touted reviews are hilarious nerdery, people devoting paragraphs to discuss guitar tone like they are talking about fine wine (in an equally bullshit fashion). Actually, what it reminds me most of is internet perfume enthusiasts. The one big element that is most often missed is music. They get metal, but not music, so the approach becomes something like TVTropes; extreme, systemizing focus on superficial elements. Superficialities are categorized and discussed down to minutiae, simulating depth. This complaint extends beyond MA but they are the worst offenders because they enable each other with cliquish support. Pretty much every detailed or well thought out metal review turns out to be a lot of effort to miss the point.

Good points, trystero. As a resource for factual information about metal bands, MA is great. Beyond that, it is a wasteland. Actual content in the reviews is substituted for ill-conceived similes about how an album 'sounds' (eg "THIS ALBUM SOUNDS LIKE A HOARD OF HOMOSEXUAL BUFFALOES FROM HELL SODOMIZING MY EVERY ORIFICE"). The forums follow suit with their genre pedantry, list threads, and wayward trolls.

Check out those YouTube comments. Hipster black metallers really do act just like Communists. Don't like their music? You're fascist/reactionary/bourgeoisie!

The band in question is another one of those tiresome ideology before actual musical content bands. The intro just sounds like it will be the start of some generic world music-influenced alternative rock, and that's what the song ends up being, despite the band's attempts to mask it with black metal aesthetics like screams and fuzzy guitars. Narrative song development? No time for that, because music should just be a platform for propaganda. Right view, right intention, right speech, right action, maaaaaaaaan. I mean, I'm an atheist, but Buddhism has a lot of cool ideas, bro. Now for a quick puff on my electric cigarette before the Red Fang show.

Their song titles are good for a laugh at first glance, but they end up teetering more towards the infuriating. "European History Is a History of Rot" "When We Are Gone, the World Will Be Awash With Light" "Destruction, Not Reformation" "The Righteous Is the Enemy of Natural" There really can be no dialog with these people. The funny part is that they aren't even really good at following up on their own agitprop. If white people are so evil, why do the people behind Book of Sand continue to befoul the earth with their horrid whiteness? The fact that they haven't killed themselves yet proves that they are really capitalists at heart. How sad...

Metal-Archives is useful for looking up concrete information on bands, but the forum culture is pretty degraded. A few of the reviewers like this guy, this guy, and this guy seem to be generally on the ball most of the time (word choice is important at the end of that sentence).